drift / sync issue with ProRes playback

[Jeremy Garchow]

is everything fully rendered and do you have the option of dropping frames on ETT turned on in your prefs?

Are you using ETT or are you just crash recording?

Have you mixed down your audio?

Are ALL of your media files (pictures, audio, etc) on your scratch drive or do you have stuff fragmented around your other hard drives on your computer?

[Miska Draskoczy]

yes everything is rendered and on the same 4-drive raid 5 (can do over 150mb/s). abort on drop frames is ON in prefs (otherwise I can’t make a tape master if its going to skip frames) in any case, I’m not getting dropped frame errors, its just falling massively out of sync with no error messages. I’m also at this point not even using media files to do tests, just bars and tone, which should take very little bandwidth to play in ProRes since there is no intraframe movement.

the plot thickens – I did more tests, fiddling with the view->video playback setting:

AJA Kona 1080i29.97 10-bit (1920×1080)
– playing from the timeline (not ETT), external monitor/SDI quickly falls approx 2-3 secs out of sync.
-Using ETT, same thing, quickly goes out of sync by 2-3 secs.

AJA Kona 1080i29.97 8-bit (1920×1080)
– playing from timeline (not ETT), external monitor/SDI DOES stay in sync! (and this isn’t even supposed to be the setting for ProRes HQ, right?).
-Using ETT, same thing, quickly goes out of sync, but by a lesser amount, 1-2 secs.

gotta be a setting or driver/config issue somewhere, but can’t seem to see what that could be.

-m

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’d try uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers.

Jeremy

[Miska Draskoczy]

thanks, tried it again with both the 5.1 NDD drivers and 5.1, still doesn’t work.
-m

[Jeremy Garchow]

Are you sure that your timeline is setup for 10bit rendering and not 8bit? It’s curious that 10 bit is busted an 8bit will work. It seems to me that your timeline is not matching your output settings.

Jeremy

[Miska Draskoczy]

yep, ‘render 10-bit material in high-precision YUV’ radio button is selected in the video processing tab of the sequence settings. i’m loading the AJA ProRes HQ 1080i29.97 preset to make these sequences, so unless they’re misconfigured somehow to begin with, they should match.

-m

[Jeremy Garchow]

Is it an older 8Core or new one?

Are your PCIe slots configured properly?

It seems to me something is set up wrong. Perhaps try hitting up AJA support and see if they can send you in the right direction.

support at aja dot com.

Jeremy

[Miska Draskoczy]

its a new mac pro, early 2008, so it doesn’t have the PCI slot configuration utility. thats the weird thing, from tracking down what seems the be the same problem that other people were having, they had the older 8-cores and using the PCI slot config util solved it a/v sync issues. But the new macs don’t have that util (apparently pci 2.0 doesn’t need it) so what to do…

I’ve been talking to AJA as well, they haven’t figured it out yet either. They suggested I exchange cards, which I will do eventually if nothing else works but it seems like since its only happening with one codec that it must be a configuration error.

thanks,
-m

[Andrew Freiband]

I’m tempted to start a new thread on this, but our similarities are striking enough I wanted to weigh in here – we are also having sync and drift problems playing out through a Kona LHe from a Mac Pro 4GB dual 500 GB SATA RAID. But we have the problem not only within Final Cut, but in any playout through the Kona, including our playlisting/broadcasting software from Softron. We’ve trouble-shot that software to death, and it seems solid, in addition to other tesimony about Kona drift problems, that’s where everything is pointing. We also experience occasional video breakup, with lost frames

We are playing out uniform 1280×720 59.94, and have seen the same issue with ProRes, None, and 8-bit Uncompressed codecs.

Drivers are updated, PCI slot utility (2007 Mac Pro) has been run and optimized, everything else we can think of. We have even attached a blackburst generator to the Kona, with no effect (unfortunately we don’t have a Tri Sync genny handy; though in a limited test the same problem was observed playing out NTSC with the blackburst attached). Unfortunately I put a request in with Aja support a week ago and haven’t heard anything, and their phone line just cuts off without so much as an answering service.

Any and all help is much much appreciated, this has been a stumper, and frustrating as anything

[Andrew Freiband]

Just to be fair, I have gotten through to Aja support and we are working on it – I didn’t fully take into account the time-zone thing, though I didn’t ever hear back on the email front… Still, anyone here with some input on this question will be welcomed with open arms-